There is something undeniably powerful about delicacy in music. The affective quality of sounds issuing forth like whispers and songs imbued with ethereal intimacy is a potent force, however understated it may seem on the surface.

That’s lovely and all but sometimes what you really need is a big fucking moose of a song. “Born to Ruin,” the lead single from the new album by Toronto’s Wildlife, is that moose in full gear, stampeding toward you like a massive, majestic world of heft.

You can sense those big hooves coming at you right from the start. A wail of guitar feedback lathers itself up behind some big, reverberating drums, then the rest of the band shoves the song forward. Vocalist Dean Povinsky leads with, “Baby, we were born to ruin / With a stake and a storm through the heart,” and the weirdly poetic sentiment meshes perfectly with the track’s swaggering, anthemic feel. “Born to Ruin” calls to mind indie rock outfits who have elevated their sound to a craft–fine acts like The National or Young the Giant who can transform three and a half minutes into a searing, visceral statement about life.

“Born to Ruin” is the second track from On the Heart, the band’s new, excellent sophomore album. Povinsky has described Wildlife’s 2010 debut as “critically acclaimed (but) not so good selling.” Here’s hoping On the Heart intensifies their spotlight and changes the latter half of that equation.

Click here to listen to On the Heart on Spotify.

Back in 1980, the supposed gulf separating new wave from prog rock was perceived to be only slightly less wide than the distance from the sun to Pluto. Proggers disdained the new wave’s ethos of DIY simplicity, while new wavers deplored prog’s pretensions to musical sophistication and general fuddy-duddiness. (The new wavers could sometimes develop a severe case of cognitive dissonance when it came to such things as “Vienna” by Ultravox, which ruminated on Olde Europa to the jaunty strains of a violin solo – tricks lifted straight from the prog playbook. But let’s not talk about that.)

So it was an act of purest heresy when Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn, the new wave duo The Buggles, replaced Rick Wakeman and Jon Anderson in Yes. Such things were simply not done at the dawn of the ’80s and the morally offended hosts of new wave shows on college radio stations quickly excised such songs as “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “Vermillion Sands,” and “I am a Camera” from their playlists. The Buggles had been one of us, but they’d gone over to the enemy.

A lot has changed in 32 years, and now the idea of blending new wave with prog is not particularly unusual. What is unusual is for someone to do it as explicitly and sort of weirdly as Athens, Georgia’s I Come to Shanghai do on “Nothing to Conceal.”

“Nothing to Conceal” starts out as straight-up synth-pop, sounding like an outtake from Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell or The Human League’s Travelogue. The music proceeds as a fairly stark combo of synth-pulse and drum machines while vocalist Robert Ashley sings about a sleeping woman. During the bridge, what seems to be a guitar talk-box drops in and things start getting pretty florid in a hurry, as if the original line-up of King Crimson dropped into the studio for a visit. Things get even proggier at the song’s climax, when it sounds like I Come to Shanghai decided to mate Steve Hackett’s guitar solos from Genesis’ “The Musical Box” with Andy McKay’s demented oboe heroics from Roxy Music’s “Ladytron.”

The song is a synthesis of genres that at one time would have been unthinkable, and to I Come to Shanghai’s great credit, still feels pretty damn strange on “Nothing to Conceal.” Breeding prog with new wave may not be the unforgivable sin it was thirty years ago, but I Come to Shanghai manage to somehow still find a way to make it feel fresh and even slightly transgressive.

Click here to listen to Eternal Life Vol. 2 on Spotify.

On what is a shoo-in for one of the best singles of 2013, John Grant sculpts an elaborate diss track over an electrostatic 4/4 beat, twisting his tongue around scathing couplets. His verbal virility on “Black Belt” produces a series of memorable turns of phrase, each more delicious than its predecessor. During the first verse, for instance, he cuts down the song’s target with, “You are supercilious, pretty and ridiculous / You got really good taste, you know how to cut and paste.”

Not content to leave well enough alone, Grant comes back during the second verse to drop a certain heretofore unsung adjective that would make your SAT prep instructor blush. “You are callipygian, but look at the state you’re in / You got really nice clothes; bet you didn’t pay for those,” he quips. This follows his taunt from earlier in the verse, when he asks, “You really think that you can school me in semantics?” Nope. I, for one, would not step to that.

Of course a keen vocabulary is but one of the many charms “Black Belt” has to offer. There is Grant’s vocal delivery, a melodic near rapping which has been digitally tweaked to better mesh with the track’s robotic groove. Synthesizers croak like frogs–an old New Order trick put to better use here–and zap out low bass tones, lending a little elasticity to the feel. Given how brilliantly executed the whole thing is, it’s even more remarkable considering that tunes like this one aren’t Grant’s bread and butter but rather a glimpse of breadth the spectrum of his upcoming sophomore LP, Pale Green Ghosts.

The record, which will be released via Partisan Records on May 14th, is the much anticipated follow up to Queen of Denmark, a critical darling which snagged MOJO’s Album of the Year among other plaudits back in 2010. Grant was far from a newcomer, though: his stellar LPs as the voice of The Czars speak for themselves. Still, it seems that it wasn’t until he ventured out on his own that Grant realized his full potential, and “Black Belt” is emblematic of that potential continuing to grow in both quality and scope.

Our first date with Seatraffic came last August when the A-side from their “Crimes” 7″ was included in a Sunday Sampler. Since then, the San Francisco duo has been working on refining their dreamy synth-pop in advance of a new series of new singles and it’s clear they deserve the benefit of the full spotlight here.

“Superficial Heart” is set amid a firmament of flickering synthesizer notes and a simple drum pattern which create a transfixing, dreamy groove. Vocalist Mark Zannad stretches out each mid-range note until they nearly become part of the song’s ethereal drone. His style is a superb match for the song’s central lyrical concern, an introspective chorus that wonders, “What do you want, superficial heart?”

The production on “Superficial Heart” never feels too dense–there is always sunlight peeking through, shimmering on the surface–part of which can surely be credited to producer Nic Pope who has previously highlighted that same sensibility in the work of Twin Shadow and The Morning Benders. That sense of balance between lightness and substance is what makes this track stand up so well to repeated listens and makes us excited for the other singles and (hopefully) debut LP ahead.

Click here to listen to the Superficial Heart single on Spotify.

PS – Seatraffic released the second single in this series, “Tempo of Regret,” earlier this week.